Booted from GoDaddy and Google, American neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer finds a new .RU home
Update: American neo-Nazi website lasts less than a day on new .RU domain thanks to Russia's Internet censor
The American neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has found a new home on the .ru domain, after being booted from GoDaddy and Google’s hosting services. The website’s new address was paid for and registered with the Russian company RU-CENTER on August 15 for a one-year period. The website’s registration data does not identify the owner.
On August 15, a self-described “security and research” expert named Bill Sader tweeted circumstantial evidence that The Daily Stormer’s servers are now located in Russia. The website’s owner mask the site’s original IP-address using the service CloudFlare.
Until recently, The Daily Stormer relied on the Internet hosting service GoDaddy. Following last weekend’s violence by far-right groups Charlottesville, however, GoDaddy gave the neo-Nazi website 24 hours to find another domain.
The hosting company was responding to an article by the website’s founder, Andrew Anglin, who insulted 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who died in Charlottesville. Anglin called her a “drain on society” because she was unmarried and childless. Heyer attended the march as a counter-demonstrator, and she was killed when a far-right activist intentionally ploughed into a Heyer’s group with his car.
The Daily Stormer initially tried to relocate itself to a domain hosted by Google, but it was soon blocked there, as well.
Apparently as early as April 10, 2017, The Daily Stormer has also operated a page on Vkontakte, Russia's largest social media platform. The most recent post reads, “Back on the normie web, with a .ru domain.”
Update: CloudFlare has reportedly dropped The Daily Stormer, which could explain why even the website's new Russian domain no longer loads.
In accordance with court orders, the Russian Justice Ministry currently bans 62 different non-governmental organizations as extremist groups, including several far-right groups, such as Russian National Unity, the Russian All-National Union, and the Ukrainian National Assembly.